The Skin Flint Web Author

Free Stuff for Web Authors

Greetings fellow tight wads. You may notice that I have
some cool stuff on our pages. I'll let you on a little secret - I haven't
paid for any of it. My web space is supplied by Dragonfire, Geocities and
Tripod, I have linked to webcounter for the hit count function and to Lpage
for my guest book. So if you surf the web but you're not on the web,
follow the links to create your own site for nix - and lose your web
virginity with me.

For those who regularly visit this page, especially those who have made
contributions, I have had email problems, and exams over the past couple of
months so updates have been slow. You will find a bunch of new stuff here
now.

I haven't created any graphics yet, other than the crappy
banners, and the crappy looking (but cool) push
buttons (requires Netscape 3.0). The rest are simply links to other
sites. Remember that if you do use this practice, it is wise to seek permission
before using anything - unless permission is given in the web page itself;
some generous souls have pages dedicated to providing the stingy with fantastic
graphics. My backgrounds come from one such library.

Free Web Space

Membership
of Geocities is free and each member is provided with up to 1M of disk
space for free. You can get a few good images in a megabyte and I'll do
that as soon as I can get around to it. Geocities has a pretty cool structure
(neighbourhood/theme based) , some incentive schemes and supports Mailto
forms but not full CGI scripts. The form data is emailed to you - quite
a nifty little feature. This particular page is locate on the Geocities
server.

The space available and the thematic structure make Geocities
an attractive location, but the home page tools are not as easy to use
as the Tripod equivalent. For slightly more advanced users, you can generate
your HTML on your PC and upload using a facility called EZupload. This
is a hell of a lot easier than FTP.

While your here I would suggest checking out Freeloader.
This is a fantastic tool which downloads websites onto you hard disk in
the background or over night.

Tripod is similar to Geocities but provides only 100K of disk space. 100K is not the greatest but still sufficient to create a reasonable Web page, as long as you don't go overboard with graphics - again linking to off site graphics is a space saving boon. Tripod has a couple of HTML editing tools which make setting up your own web space ridiculously easy for the least knowledgeable user. Tripod also allows you to create Mailto forms.

Dragonfire
provides 25M of disk space Free and allows true CGI scripts, but only
Perl or shell scripts as you cannot compile on the Dragonfire machine.
You need good knowledge of FTP to use this site but if you know your stuff
the facilities are second to none. If you have no idea what I am talking
about use Geocities or Tripod. Dragonfire went down for several
weeks after a hacker brought the system down - its now OK for WWW
browsing, but the CGI support still is deactivated. Thanks to
Ryan Brown for letting me know.

TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. The hit counter on the
contents page
is provided by Webcounter. These can be set to a number of
font types, sizes, number of digits etc. The number of hits is recorded
by Webcounter and added to their top 10 top 100 and top 1000 lists - this
could be useful because if your page gets popular enough you can sell advertising
space. Then you won't have to worry about scrounging around for freebies.
This counter can be configured to only record hits from unique sites.

NEWS FLASH: Web counter have temporarily suspended their free service
until they can upgrade their system. Webcounter also supply commercial
grade counters, with reliability guaranteed - but not for free.

Geocities, Tripod and Dragonfire all support their own
counters. The Geocities and Tripod counters are available only to members.
Check out Dragonfire for a
counter
that can be used from any page. Unfortunately these counter all record
multiple hits from a single user.

Free Guest Book

Once again I am using guest book supplied by Lpage.com
. It is a basic sort of a guest book and you cannot change the input
fields, but the format of the output page comes in several variations,
and you can alter the title, background and text colours.

I previously stopped using LPage because it tended to be slow
and unreliable. If you want garanteed reliability or If you want more
flexibility in the forms, you will have to pay.

The
Pergatory
Guest Book server is dead - Rest in Peace. Thanks to
Nicholas for
notifying me that Pergatory is up again. However this time the
'free' guestbook is for a thirty day trial period only.

Free Email

Geocities provides a free Email service which I have tried
out, but it can't use through the fire wall when I dial up. I would recommend
this if you currently use your work PC for personal Email - which potentially
could prove to be embarrassing, or if you want to be able to easily change
access provider without changing your Email address.

I have been alerted to several free email suppliers.
I lost the name (email problem) of the person who told me about
Hotmail who provide free
email accounts. Gavin Brock
suggested Net Address which
I haven't checked out yet. I've also come accross
iName which allows you to
select from various email domain names, for instance
romp@mad.scientist.com

Free Advertising

The single most important place to advertise your site
is the major search engines, Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo etc. However the easiest
way to do this is to use one of the front ends. With these you load the
required data once into the front end and it automatically updates several
of the search engines. The alternative is for you to enter the same data
into each of the search engines.

Another way to advertise your page is to use banner exchange programs such
as
Georewards and
Internet Link Exchange (Here's my IEL
stats.)
I place a banner on
my page which is automatically assigned to me by the banner server.
This earns me credit which is used to advertise the crappy banner at
the top of this page on other peoples' pages. Also don't forget to add your URL to my
add-a-link
page. Its easy.

Free HTML editors

There are several free HTML product that I have used,
but I haven't decided which is the best to recommend. I have used AOL Press,
HoT MetaL, Netscape Gold and Microsoft Internet Assistant. They all have
their pros and cons - I'll get around to making a recommendation eventually.
None of these do the full job and I am inclined to write the code by hand
at the movement.

Free Logo

This
guy Tony (another Aussie ;-0) has promised to do me a matching banner and
logo once I get my hit counter above 300 - so tell your friends about my
pages and help me out. Any way, getting back to Tony, he will create a
free logo or banner for you so check out his site.

Free Theme Music

Geoff
will provide a free theme tune for some lucky people to use on their
page(s). He can provide midi or .wav format like the one here. He whipped
this one up overnight - pretty good going Geoff, thanks. By the way, he's
also an Aussie.

Syntax Checking

There are several HTML syntax checking services on the
net, there are also more than one spell checker. I like
Dr. Watson. It is simple to use, offers lax, normal and strict
HTML syntax checking and checks the status of all of the links on a
page as well as a a spell check! Before you write this service off,
note that I have not finished checking all of my pages.

Free Access

This is the trickiest part. I have two means of access;
one is my employer. This is truly
free access, but I am restricted to using this access for work purposes
only. The other free access is through the university
where I study - some may consider this free access, but on the other hand
if I you aren't already studying this access costs $40,000 pa. (I'm sure
you could do better than that paying commercial rates:)

Related Sites

What's Next?

I will continue to scan the Web to bring you the best
web stuff that I can and tips on how to add features to you web pages for
nothing. If you have any suggestions, either for new categories or products
and services within categories -
email
me. Thanks Charlie for the info on Web Counter.

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